Aug 14, 2017

I picked today's polish out of my box of untrieds because I've had a hankering for creme polishes. To tell the truth, I wasn't expecting too much, but I ended up quite liking it!

[Bottle to nail: OPI Embrace the Grey (2 coats)]

So here's OPI Embrace the Grey from the Fifty Shades collection, which I received as a gift from a lovely friend!

[2 coats: OPI Embrace the Grey]

Embrace the Grey is a medium grey creme polish. It applies well, especially with the wide brush, and is nice and opaque at two coats. The formula is really nice too, thin enough to flow easily and gives a sort of squishy jelly-creme look.

[2 coats: OPI Embrace the Grey]

I think this is a really nice addition to my collection and I don't have another shade quite like it, so I'm all around quite pleased with it!

Aug 10, 2017

It's been awhile! I was very busy and left Ev to fend for herself awhile there. But I'm back now and I come bearing gradient plus decals!

[Dreaming of Dawn]

So I started with Miniso Japan Purple as my base nail polish. I reviewed the nail polish here. Then I hunted down a nail polish which would give me a subtle colour change, and ended up with Covergirl Midnight Magic, which we have reviewed before a couple times. Midnight Magic is a blue foil with gold, green and pink microglitter, and if you apply it in thin enough layers, you can build up its opacity slowly. That means it makes a pretty good nail polish to use for making gradients. I didn't use a sponge, just applied straight to the nail with the brush, but in thin layers.

[Base: Miniso Japan PurpleTo the tips: Covergirl Midnight Magic]

After that, I used a decal over the lot of it. I wish I could tell you more about the decals, but they were a gift and there was no brand that I remember. It was a decal of feathers and dream catchers I believe, but most of the art couldn't be clearly seen once applied to my nails.

[Decal on top of the following:Base: Miniso Japan PurpleTo the tips: Covergirl Midnight Magic]

The end result is a cool-toned mani that looks strangely witchy to me for some reason. Anyway, it was an easy mani for a fun result!

Aug 7, 2017

It feels like I haven't done a stamping manicure for a while so I made myself go through my plates and found a design I've been wanting to try out..

[<3 <3 <3]

Hearts! I like these scribbly heart design from Born Pretty plate BP-L013. I originally planned to stamp in a dusty pink creme but all my Mundo de Unas stamping minis are currently terribly separated and I haven't yet figured out an easy way to mix them back up together..

[Bottle to nail: Australis Pinot-Dah (1 coat)]

Just to quickly recap, my base shade from last week is Australis Pinot-Dah, a dark wine red creme.

I think I'm a little out of practice doing stamping manicures though! Gotta swipe faster/lighter! At any rate, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. A bit less obvious than my original pastel pink stamp idea, but this is nice and subtle instead!

Jul 31, 2017

Feeling a bit uninspired lately... and I always seem to default back to red shades when that happens. Eh, well, you just can't go wrong with the classics, I guess!

[Bottle to nail: Australis Pinot-Dah (1 coat)]

This time, I chose Australis Pinot-Dah, a deep wine red creme, as you may have guessed from the name!

[1 coat: Australis Pinot-Dah]

I only used one coat, and it was pretty much opaque. I've taken these photos under direct lighting so you can almost see some lighter parts, but this is pretty much invisible to the eye. The shade is also a a little darker than shown and actually leans a bit cooler.

[1 coat: Australis Pinot-Dah]

Formula was great, leveled nicely and dried glossy, though as usual, I applied a layer of topcoat over to finish. A nice basic vampy shade. As a bonus, Pinot-Dah also works great as a stamping polish, which Jme previously posted about here!

Jul 24, 2017

I'm (very very) slowly working through my "untrieds" box! Here's one from a birthday a while ago....

[Bottle to nail: Revlon Parfumerie Wintermint (2 coats)]

This is Wintermint from the Revlon Parfumerie range, a collection of scented polishes. These come in the cutest ever little "perfume bottle" shape!

[2 coats: Revlon Parfumerie Wintermint]

Wintermint is a frosty mint green shimmer with lots of silver microglitter and small teal hexes. I also feel that the shimmer in the base shade leans slightly gold which warms the shade up a bit.

[2 coats: Revlon Parfumerie Wintermint]

Formula-wise, it was pretty easy to handle - two easy thin coats that dried quickly. However, I'm not really a fan of the slightly frosty finish. It's not streaky by any means, but somehow the combination of glitter and the shimmer base combines to give a faintly dated look. This polish also dries textured, although all the glitter lays nice and flat!

[2 coats: Revlon Parfumerie Wintermint]

Scent-wise, it was a pretty mild minty scent as you'd expect. Nice and fresh (rather than toothpaste-y), which is where the winter part of the name comes in. Quite a pleasant inoffensive scent, but only really detectable if you bring your nails up close for a sniff, and the fragrance had faded pretty much completely by the second day.

Jul 21, 2017

I got Born Pretty's Professional Nail Art Design Brush Set and Dotting Pen. I've been wanting a brush set for awhile now because I've seen how useful they can be but have been holding out from getting them for ages due to irrational fear that they would be difficult to use, haha. Well, never hurts to try!

The set consists of 11 brushes and a dotting pen. As you can see from the first picture, each brush (except the fan-like brush) come with their own plastic protector. In the second photo, you can see the various flat brushes, fine brushes and the very tiny dotting tool.

[Nail patches peeled off a silicone nail art mat]

Tada, the results of my hard work! You can see I was experimenting with the pattern before I settled on something. So I started out by painting with my base nail polish Ulta3's Spring Break on a silicone nail art mat. Spring Break is a dark purple creme polish. Then, I painted over Spring Break using one of the flat brushes in the set above to make the yellow upside down triangle. I used Ulta3's Honolulu for the yellow. It's so much easier making a pointy triangle when you actually have the right brush for it, hahah. There's no need to wait for nail polish to dry and then mess around with tape, or do very slow careful free hand with fat nail polish brushes.

Then I used the very tiny dotting tool to dot on nail polish. It's actually so easy to do dotticure when done first on a flat mat! I had no idea, really, I'm so used to dotting on my nails directly. And I find it's so much easier to control the dots with a dotting tool that has such a small head. For most of the dots above, I used a liberal amount of nail polish to create larger dots. They went on so smoothly. I could actually do much tinier and neater dots as well, if I used less nail polish per dot, but I didn't want my dots to be that small this time. But I have ideas for next time already!